More specifically, I blamed Victoria's raw sewage, which is pumped out to the Juan de Fuca Strait at a rate of 130 million litres per day. British Columbia's capital is one of the last major cities north of San Diego to dump all of its untreated waste (including pesticides, street runoff and pharmaceuticals) into the ocean. On Friday, the sewer's screening system failed, spilling three million extra litres of unfiltered crap into Ross Bay.

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"Victoria thinks they're miraculously in a different situation."

When I relate this anecdote to the scientists tasked with monitoring Victoria's sewer situation, Chris Lowe and Glenn Harris of the Regional District's environmental protection division confirm the vast majority of testing happens within a few hundred metres of Greater Victoria's two major sewer outfalls. They test for a great many things -- heavy metals, bacteria, dissolved oxygen, hundreds more toxins -- but at a relatively short distance. Then they use computer models to extrapolate where it goes. This happens in weekly, monthly and quarterly cycles. Government guidelines don't require more remote testing, so they don't generally do it.

Lowe and Harris told me bacteria tests do routinely exceed water quality guidelines -- a problem that seems to be getting worse as time passes. Fecal coliform is a group of bacteria found in poop that can carry illness-causing pathogens like salmonella, E. coli and norovirus. Between tests in 2010 and 2013, the average fecal coliform count in Victoria's wastewater pipes went from 5.3 and 5.7 million bacteria per 100 millilitres of water up to 7.2 and 9.3 million bacteria per 100 millilitres of water.

Victoria is one of the few remaining Canadian cities that does little to treat its sewage, essentially pumping 130 million litres of raw effluent daily into the Juan de Fuca Strait.

Environmentalists and communities in the United States complain of pollution, while scientists say the ocean acts as a natural toilet that flushes and disperses waste with minimal environmental impact.

Gov. Inslee said the sewage issue poses health and economic issues for the area, because the untreated waste flows toward Washington State.

“Left unresolved, Victoria’s lack of wastewater treatment has the potential to colour other regional and national issues at a time when our two countries are working to re-establish steady economic growth through various cross-border initiatives,” said the letter.

The National Research Defense Council and Environmental Integrity Project released the report "Swimming in Sewage" in 2004, which also documented the effects of sewage pollution, though the focus was broader than the EPA's combined sewer overflow study. The nonprofit groups' report included this now oft-cited bit of data specific to overflows:

Each year, 1.8 million to 3.5 million illnesses are caused by swimming in water contaminated by sewage overflows, and an additional 500,000 from drinking contaminated water.

One of the most troubling effects of polluted runoff is the contamination of peoples' drinking water--something we might take for granted as safe. More than half of the documented waterborne disease outbreaks in the US since 1948 occurred after extreme rainfalls, according to a 2001 peer-reviewed study. A 2003 study likewise made the connection between polluted stormwater runoff and waterborne disease.

Northwesterners generally can expect clean, safe drinking water to flow from their taps. But that's not always the case. There are numerous local examples of drinking water that's fouled when sewage and stormwater flow into waterways, or when storm runoff directly dumps fertilizers, fecal bacteria, and other pollution into our drinking water sources.